ِAs far as we know, humans are the main responsible species on the planet that has rapidly change the face of the earth. It all started by discovering fire using hunting tools and ended in conquering lands inventing countless inventions on both civil and cultural aspects. Our capabilities manifested in creating machines and devices that facilitate our lives and amplify our abilities. Many people believe in the power of the mind as the master of the universe that made us able to create intelligent machines and robots. Such intelligent is called artificial because it is a result of our mere inventions; no living thing is involved. Yet, many people envision themselves superior to all other animate and inanimate objects, asserting that we are the cause of these technologies that would not be without us. Nevertheless, is this comparison and claims always hold?

3d printers can guide us through our understanding of the universe. Recently we have become able to create a small prototype of heart using printers. The tissues of the heart were genetically modified and are transformed into ink that can be used in the printer to construct the designed 3d shape, which is a living organ in this case. Such an attempt, even though it is early, is revolutionary because it changes our beliefs about where we usually come from. With the advancement of genetics, we could transplant organs like kidneys, stomachs, and hearts. We also were able to take a small tissue of organs and genetically facilitate its growth to a new organ. All that we did is we either use living cells to create other cells.

What is new in the 3d printer breakthrough is that a machine has become able to create organs that can be implanted in the future into the human body. If this technique were proven to be practical and effective, does it mean that we would be able to simply print organs as we print other 3d shapes? Moreover, hypothetically in the future where robots would be intelligent and independent beings, would a robot create a human using 3d printer and other inventions that would be invented by that time? Consequently, does that support the idea of human superiority or we are just an intelligent species that will eventually lead to a much more intelligent, powerful, and controlling one?

Computers have transformed our lives in so many different aspects. They enabled us to calculate, store, input, and output information, and from those simple operations, the fields of programming, robotics, and AI emerged and continue to grow till today. We are approaching a new different technology that can further amplify our capabilities. This technology is quantum computing. As the name may suggest, this technology is associated with quantum mechanics that include subatomic particles such as electrons and photons. Those particles behave differently from the natural laws that we can observe and sense.

One of the characters of these particles is the superposition. It can be understood by knowing the simplest units that a computer consists of: bit. Each bit in the computer contains one particular value: either 0 or 1, and all the information processed in the computer are changed into values of zeros and ones that the computer can understand and operate accordingly. In a quantum computer, this binary identity in the bit is blurred. A quantum bit, which is a subatomic particle, does not have a definite value; its value is a spectrum of range between 0 and one. For example, a single quantum bit might have a 50% probability of 0 and 50% of 1. The same bit can have different possibilities such as 74% of 0 and 26% of 1. However, when this bit is read, it either gives 100% 0 or 100% 1. The power of this characteristic is that it exponentially increases the operations that can be done by a couple few bits. An implementation of this technology is keys that can have unbreakable encryption codes, which will reduce incidents of hacking institutions such as banks and personal information on internet accounts, and that will lead to safer networks all over the world.

Another interesting characteristic is the entanglement, which connects two or more quantum bits in a way that if any bit is changed, others change spontaneously and accordingly no matter what the distance between them is. Using this feature, we can know the information of a bit by looking at its connected one.

Both superposition and entanglement allow us to perform operations much more efficiently and quickly. Nevertheless, there was an experiment done by Shohini Chose’s team and presented in a Ted talk that blew my mind. She presented a coin flipping game that relies on luck. It starts when player A chooses to flip or not flip the coin. Then player B, not knowing the new face of the coin, chooses to whether flip or not flip the coin. Player A makes the same choice, and then the face of the coin is revealed. If the face matches the one that was first seen at the beginning of the game, player A wins. Otherwise, player B wins. When the quantum computer was player A, it did not choose a specific face for the coin: head or tail. The face was instead a combination of both, so it remains the same whether the player chooses to flip the coin or not. At the end of the game, the computer outputs the bit as the original face of the coin. By doing so, the computer almost won all the games in the experiment although the game has a winning chance of 50:50. Such a game made me think of the abilities robots and AI might have if their hardware became a quantum computer and programs similar to the game were designed for those them. Would they have the ability to trick others as humans do? Does this mean that they would acquire the conscious that we always brag about as humans? And would they be any different from us?

Shohini Chose Ted Talk

https://www.ted.com/talks/shohini_ghose_quantum_computing_explained_in_10_minutes?language=en

Due to the continuous technological progress nowadays, we are getting used to use these technologies and sometimes totally rely on them while using machines and devices in our daily life. In particular, because we adapted to the intangible interaction with those machines, we think they are granted things in our surroundings and hardly can imagine how we will function and practice our daily activities without using them. Therefore, we may not appreciate the benefits of those devices because they are available all the time and we have not experienced their absence in our life. I happened to be incapable of using most of nowadays machines and devices when I was in Yemen during the first six months of the current conflict there. During that time, I was deprived of using several machines considered as necessities in the twenty-first century.
Before illustrating how miserable my life and many Yemenis’ went due to the inability of using many machines and appliances, the situation in Yemen needs to be known. Conflicts between political parties and groups and the government had been evolving since 2014, and those conflicts manifested in the intervention of other Arabic countries to supposedly aid the government on March 26, 2015. Right after this date, electricity was cut in almost all the governorates, and there was a lack of oil products like the benzene and gasoline. Due to the power shortage, most machines stopped working. Those machines range from individual devices such as mobiles and laptops to house appliances like TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, sweepers, irons, heaters, etc. in addition to the machines in bakeries, factories, hospitals, and other buildings. Nevertheless, as humans of the twenty-first century, we could not live without many of these machines, so we managed as individuals to find other ways of electricity supply to generate a small amount of electricity that could power a limited number of machines and devices such as mobiles, TV, laptops, and sometimes blenders and washing machines for those who were considered to be privileged. In this article, I will describe the sufferings my family faced as a middle-class family because machines like water pumps, heaters, refrigerators, conditioners, and washing machines stopped working.

Since electricity was cut in most cities in the country -including the one I live in, Sanaa – public water companies could not pump water to the houses. Therefore, people got water through water trucks, and those who could not afford it had to depend on free water tanks filled by wealthy people as kind of charity. Besides, people were able to afford the water from the trucks could not pump the water to the containers on the roofs of buildings because water pumps were electric and were not working because of the power outage in the city. Thus, we had to fill bottles and containers with water from the truck so that we could use this water in houses, and the way we use water in homes was primitive. For instance, If I want to use water for a simple thing such as washing my hands, I would hold a cup or a small bottle of water in my left hand and wash the right hand. I would then repeat the same process to clean my left hand. After a couple of months, our block families managed to buy a big generator that could power the water pump for few hours so that we could have water in pipes for few hours. Nonetheless, even when water happened to be used through pipes, we could not use hot water regularly because the heater was not working; that is because the electricity generated from electric generators was not enough to run heaters and other high power appliances. Therefore, if we were sure that we would be able to find gasoline to buy shortly, my siblings and I would be lucky to have a hot shower after heating water on the cooker.

Cooling was another suffering we had to face. Fridges were emptied since the power outage in the country, which means that there was no food or drinks to be cooled or saved for a couple of days. Thus, my mother needed to be careful in not exceeding the amount of the ingredients while preparing food; otherwise, we would have had to eat the same meal for lunch and dinner. All of this got to be worse during Ramadan when we needed to drink cold water, juice or eat a cold or frozen dessert after fasting a long hot day. To have cold drinks, for instance, we had to buy ice cubes from peddlers who got to purchase big ice cubes from factories. I remember rushing to the peddler standing on the pavement of block I live in before sunset and standing in the crowd to buy a couple of cubes to be able to enjoy a cup of juice at night. The people of Sanaa and I had a better situation than hot cities in Yemen. Sanaa has moderate weather in summer because of its location in heights, which means low humidity and temperature, in addition to the heavy rains that fall in summer. Therefore, people do not have conditioners in houses and some do not need to use fans in summer. That was a blessing for us during the conflict because people in hot cities who could not turn on conditioners or even fans. Consequently, they had to withstand a high temperature up to 50 in some cities, and sicknesses and epidemics spread quickly.

Because of the outage of electricity supply, we also had to suffer from cleaning issues in houses. As expected, we were not able to use sweepers to clean the house because it consumes a high amount of electricity. Hence, we had to use brooms instead, which made cleaning much harder. Furthermore, washing machines were not working, and my mother had to hand wash clothes, and that took enormous time and effort. Once my mother put a blanket in a bathtub half filled with water and detergent and asked me to stomp on it for a considerable amount to get it cleaned. Not surprisingly, there was no dryer available, and you can imagine the mess we had to deal with to get the clothes dry and ready to be worn.

Fortunately, I could travel from Yemen six months after the war started, and I could get back to my normal life. However, my family and the vast majority of Yemenis still face those issues until today. What I described was only the necessities of a middle-class family in Yemen. I did not explain how patients and doctors in suffer in hospitals, how workers could manage to complete their tasks, etc. I also would like to note that the cities of Yemen are not crowded and do not have subways or trains. I think that the consequences in Cairo, New Delhi, or Tokyo would be much more catastrophic because the more the city and its people depend on automata and machine, the more impossible and unimaginable the life would be without them. Such reality emphasizes the blessing that we have the luxury to use all those machines, appliances, devices, and technologies that facilitate our life and expand our abilities.

The chapter introduces the topic of remote intimacy by giving examples of real-life examples in which people spend time and be intimately connected to. Those examples include all types of interacting with real or virtual people or objects through the screens such as social media platforms, video games, or even movies and series. It is true that some people get deeply connected to such activities to the extent that they might isolate themselves from their physical surroundings of family and neighborhood members. The main topic of the chapter, which is the relationship between drone operators and people in the field, is a very interesting and provoking topic. I find the idea of screen killing and how easy and sometimes fun to kill a person very immoral and inhumane. Drones that make people fight through thousands of miles is not the main reason as described in the chapter;  it encourages people to act immorally. The argument that drone operators are more likely to kill than field soldiers because they do not face or interact with the insurgents or even innocent people is very sensible. Other examples can be found in cyberbullying, where people criticize, make fun of, and sometimes curse people on social media more than in real life dealings because they are sitting behind the screen and do not have to get possible reactions from the person on the other side of the screen.Moreover, what provokes me the most is that many operators did not show that they have moral and strict values that make their job more moral and beneficial to their countries as well even though some of them had such principles. I think that the reason of this is the culture of most western countries since modernism, which circulates mainly on individualism and relativity; such culture made operators act as the God who decides to take life from someone or not. For me, I think because of the limited role religions, which have almost fixed and strict moral principles, play in western societies in addition to the dominance of rationalism worldwide, western countries and communities do not have main restrictions that determine what is ethical and what is not. Furthermore, moral development is not at the same pace as the continuous materialistic discoveries and inventions. Therefore, we see people use those technologies like robots, movies and games productions, internet, and other great inventions without well-grounded morals and values. Voyeurism, enjoyment of killing others, and the rush in making decisions are all few examples of this culture’s consequences. While reading this chapter, I recalled terroristic attacks that, in my opinion, are results of modernism and nowadays media that is full of violence, one of which was the recent attack in New Zealand where the terrorist videotaped the attack and made us feel as if he was completing a video game mission.In conclusion, technologies including robots, machines, and even drones are great means that accelerate our civilization growth. It is our interaction with those inventions that determines how we use them to (amplify) our abilities.

Throughout the course, most of us argued that we, humans, are superior to any existing thing in this universe. Our main reason for why we are the best is that we think. Such a belief is a result of philosophical accumulations that supported the superiority of humans, and these philosophies manifested during the renaissance and enlightenment period. Descartes, who is famous for saying “I think. Therefore, I am,” concluded through his search for solutions for world problems that the mind is the master of the existence. His philosophy was widely accepted and spread because it was introduced to solve the chaos Europe was living during the Reformation period in the sixteenth century. It also was considered as an incentive for capitalism, and other philosophers such as Kant accepted it. This philosophy has been affecting humanity in many aspects since then. On the philosophical side, many people consider the human as a complicated machine that once science and engineering could achieve its complexity, humans’ age would end: either we would extinct such as dinosaurs or evolve, and from here transhumanism and posthumanism were introduced. On the practical side, the philosophy of “mind is the master of the universe” led to the subject-object base of people’s dealings with each other and with their surroundings. For instance, noble people utilized machines and people for their own profit with the rise of capitalism and its accompanying mass production and consumption. Labors were treated inhumanely because they were considered as less intelligent and weaker, so they were supposed to work for the benefit of others as what happened in the cotton mills of London. Other similar examples are slavery, colonialism, world wars. Nowadays, we justify doing experiments on animals and manipulate the environment because we are the masters on earth. Even when talking about any universal threat such as global warming or aliens, we discuss it from the point of the possible consequences on “humans”. With such belief, we will always act from the perspective of “we” and “them”, and we will keep comparing our intelligence with animals and robots. Moreover, we will continue doubting our existence when we get to have intelligent robots and become very afraid because we think we will be inferior to them and would experience what others suffered for us, and that is already what we see in cyborgs or robot movies.

I watched once a documentary movie called AlphaGo about artificial intelligence. The movie is about a British company that developed a computer program to play Go, an ancient Chinese board game. What is unique about Go is that it is an abstract game on a material board, and has 19×19 grid lines, which is 361 points on the board. According to the movie, the number of configurations on the board is more than the number of atoms in the universe. Such complexity and abstractness of the game have been challenging programmers to design a game that can compete with Go champions. After years of work, the company developed an algorithm that makes the game learn by itself by playing with itself, and after playing an enormous number of games, it acquired a knowledge of the possibilities of almost every move on the board. The programmers wanted to check how powerful and professional their game is. Therefore, they proposed a challenge with a Korean player, who had been the world champion of Go for several years. The game was set for three days: around for each day, and it ended up to be two to one to the robot.

The interesting thing about the movie was the feeling fear, suspense, unity and a whole bunch of emotions when the game was one, and the analysts were talking about the game. The Korean championship, judges, reporters, analysts, professional players, and viewers including me thought that such a game is crucial as it determines our intelligence, knowledge, and experience limitations. Indeed, its result will be reflected in several scopes and disciplines; robots may be able shortly to make decisions for us by considering the possibilities of every single thing in our life: from medicine, engineering to economics and politics, and if that happened, our existence would be a significant concerning question. Therefore, we felt that the winning or losing of the Korean man is ours. I think everyone, even the programmers, was somehow disappointed that we lost against a machine. Such a result invoked a lot of questions such as: what is the difference between machines and us? Will there be a point in the future that computers become the most intelligent being on earth? What will happen to us then? How come a creation can surpass its creator? Why are we upset in the first place of what we have reached by our intelligence? Is artificial intelligent progress beneficial for us? And most importantly is what our next step should be?

I think how aware and conscious about artificial intelligence we are and how we interact with its everyday growth is indispensable for us to know where we are standing and what we need to do. Besides, before posting this article, I surprisingly realized that I had used a program to proofread this article and make it better while at the same time writing about artificial intelligence and its plausible risks.

As the chapter of artificial life and the homunculus states, almost all the views and beliefs of reproduction were centered around men and sperm since they were thought to be superior to women who were viewed as “deformed humans”. Such views were popular and influential to the extent that myths and stories narrate men attempts, and sometimes success, in reproducing without mating with women; a thought we consider impossible scientifically and ridiculous socially. However, it is really weird and interesting that people in the past had such perspectives while their real life was totally different. Women were and still are the ones who get pregnant and give birth. They also traditionally feed their babies and raise them for years. Perhaps, these stories came from the desire of men to give birth as women, a feature they lack, or to imitate God in creating creatures without any help. Nevertheless, I am still wondering how Aristotle and others consider themselves to be perfect while they had been created inside imperfect and deformed bodies.